Chinese · 1904–1986
Jiang Bingzhi published Miss Sophia's Diary in 1928, at twenty-four, and shocked Shanghai with a heroine who wanted a man's body and despised herself for it. Her husband, the writer Hu Yepin, was executed by the Nationalists in 1931; she was kidnapped and held under house arrest for three years, then escaped to the Communist base at Yan'an, where Mao wrote her a poem. In 1942 she published an essay on International Women's Day pointing out that the revolution had not changed what happened to women who divorced, and was made to recant. She won a Stalin Prize in 1951 for a novel about land reform, was expelled from the Party as a rightist in 1957, spent twelve years in the Great Northern Wilderness and five in solitary confinement in Qincheng prison, and was rehabilitated in 1979. She went back to writing at seventy-five.